


My Body is a Cage (My Mind Holds the Key)

by thecryoftheseagulls



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Angst, Assassin's Creed II, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Bleeding Effect, Canon Compliant, Gen, Identity Issues, Introspection, Monteriggioni, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 20:52:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8300633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecryoftheseagulls/pseuds/thecryoftheseagulls
Summary: In the wake of years lived as Ezio, Desmond struggles with the sense of loss he feels upon returning to Monteriggioni in the modern day. He's losing himself to his ancestor's memories, and he can't totally bring himself to care.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I had a lot of emotions going from the end of AC 2 to Brotherhood, basically.
> 
> I recommend that you listen to [the Desmond Miles song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jl-dviK0vc) from the soundtrack while you read, since that's the song that plays whenever you explore modern Monteriggioni at night. And, of course, the title is taken from the Arcade Fire song.

The night of their arrival, Desmond tucks his hands in his hoodie pockets, stands at the top of the stairs to the villa and surveys the town.

The trees are older, and the building still damaged from cannon fire, but Monteriggioni looks largely the same. At first glance. He can’t get Shaun’s words out of his head. _Change is life. When things become static, it means they’re dead._ The town isn’t dead, not with the people who live here and all the lights, the tourists who come. But it’s not alive, either, not like Desmond – Ezio -- knew it before.

It had been dead when he first arrived, the great house boarded up and half the town vacant. Once, he had built this place back to greatness by the sweat of his brow. Every coin he could earn, plunder or steal he’d fed back into it. He had grown to know every nook and cranny within these stone walls, every piece of farmland without. He’d hung paintings of men who would, in another lifetime, be called great masters in the villa’s halls and laughed with Leonardo da Vinci himself here. This place had been his. Desmond’s. No, Ezio’s. He has to keep them straight, past and present, self and predecessor, or risk going crazy.

The trouble is, Desmond is beginning to welcome the crazy.

He had lived years in Ezio’s skin, feeling what Ezio felt, knowing what Ezio knew. The rough wood of the beams in the cities they climbed. The heft of Altair’s sword in Ezio’s big, rough hands. Sticky blood caked in the creases of those same hands. Desmond knew it all – grief and hatred, lust and pleasure, the sounds Ezio made in pain and weariness and arousal. For all that, Desmond had rarely gotten glimpses of his own – of Ezio’s – face, and to see Ezio from the outside, right in front of him as Desmond had tonight in the sanctuary…he didn’t have words for the feeling. That face could never be anything but beautiful, even with silver hair and his cares graven in lines about his eyes. Desmond had felt the scar, so similar to his own, with Ezio’s tongue many times, but seeing Ezio like that, he’d been struck by the desire to trace it with his own fingertips. It was a confusing distinction between their two selves that was becoming all too rare. 

With a sudden need to move in his own body over paths he has (never) walked before, Desmond circles the town. He climbs rooftops and leaps walls, and he has done this before, here, in this place, which makes it all the more confusing, because Desmond’s eyes say this is familiar, but the way his body responds to his commands is different, just a beat out of time. His hands aren’t as rough as they should be, splinters pricking at him till his too-soft palms are bloody and pierced. His arms are infinitesimally shorter than he remembers. He nearly loses his grip more times than he can count.

But it _looks_ the same – here, Desmond had collected the statue of Apollo and here, found a clutch of feathers for his _mamma_ , and over there he – had – Desmond stumbles. Because _there_ is a modern automobile, and another, and another, and there is a trash can, and yet here, there, everywhere, is too much light from electric lamps, and off in the distance, over the wall, Desmond can see city lights that don’t belong. The wood under his hands is a different grain altogether than the beams should be made of. The stucco walls of the villa _crumble_ where his sneakers touch them and the shingles on the roof are just the wrong shade of orange. 

_Wrong_ , his mind screams at him as he comes to a stop atop the roof of the villa, breathing heavily. Lucy told him to be careful, and this is just the opposite, but Desmond can’t bring himself to care, because he belongs here more than any of these people in this modern tourist town. He belongs – he belongs – he belongs nowhere, not on this version of this rooftop, not in this body, not in this home he had laid claim to in his heart and seen destroyed only hours before.

Desmond squats down on broken shingles and grasps his hair with both hands. Fuck everything, he has already gone crazy, lonely for a time that disappeared hundreds of years before his birth. Maybe he was supposed to be there, in Ezio’s head. It sure seemed like it when Minerva looked into his eyes and called him by his own name. But he can’t have any of that life back, not unless he’s strapped in a chair, and it hasn’t hit him like this before because Desmond isn’t used to walking the same streets in two different bodies and two different lifetimes. It should be cool, in a history geek kind of way, to see the changes, but it’s not. It just leaves him empty, weightless, curled on the edge of the villa’s roof, the night breeze on his cheeks. Desmond feels feather-light, hollow-boned, and if he closes his eyes he can pretend this is the same place he remembered, a haystack yards beneath his feet waiting to cradle him if he tips forward. 

But fine dust from the villa’s crumbling walls still clings to Desmond’s palms, a reminder that this place that had been more home to him than the Farm, in its own way, is a ruin of its former self. 

Funny, isn’t it, to pine after a place you’ve only known in your head.

Desmond has this itch he can’t scratch, a niggling feeling deep inside him of something off. He’d noticed it before, but killing enough Abstergo goons to make their escape and then letting himself free run here in Monteriggioni has solidified what he’d only guessed at.

There is a part of him that no longer recognizes his self as Desmond Miles, but as Ezio Auditore da Firenze. He finds himself reaching up to brush phantom hair off his neck when he changes his clothes. When he catches his reflection from the corner of his eye, he sees only a stranger. Desmond has always felt misplaced, but this? This is a nightmare. He dreams in Italian, now, has to suppress the urge to answer the team’s questions in that language. The great scars in the villa from cannon fire make something hot and fierce light up in Desmond’s chest, no matter that they were made hundreds of years before his birth.

Losing touch with reality is what Lucy fears for him, but he doesn’t think she could have predicted this, this losing of himself in a single ancestor’s life, rather than the rush of all his ancestor’s memories obliterating his sense of identity. 

And the worst part is, Desmond doesn’t know which he wants more – to _be_ Ezio, or to be _with_ Ezio. 

It’s not like he can have either, and he sure as fuck can’t go back to a time before all this shit, when he wasn’t pining after a life separated 600 years from his own. 

Fuck it.

Looks like crazy it is.


End file.
